Growing the team. Week 4.
This week has felt like a take-off. We’re building our capacity, locking in on specific projects, revealing more parts of the overall picture as we go along, as if we are learning what Ethlabs is capable of. Our AI capabilities have also much improved, and now power many of our internal jams on Slack.
#Our first hire: Francesco
Friday @fradamt announced he is joining Ethlabs.
Status update: I am moving from the Ethereum Foundation to Ethlabs @ethlabs_org, joining the team to accelerate protocol work in the age of Ethereum adoption.
— Francesco (@fradamt) July 16, 2026
In 5 years at EF Research, I have worked on research and specification of a wide range of Protocol R&D: mev, consensus,…
At Ethlabs, he will work on Ethereum Improvement Proposals that give users faster inclusion and finality. It's hard to comprehend how much Francesco has contributed to Ethereum over his past five years at the Ethereum Foundation but here are some highlights:
- Helped scale L2 throughput 8x by introducing blobs (PeerDAS EIP-7594).
- Co-created mechanism to improve transaction inclusion by increasing the number of proposers per block from 1 to 17 (FOCIL/EIP-7805).
- Laid grounds for 98% drop in bridging times (Fast Confirmation Rule).
Last week, we also mentioned closing a second hire, who will get started proper later in August. This week we’ve closed a third hire to boost our comms. I'm incredibly excited to see the synergies between the absolute best people on research, engineering, and comms.
#Sprinting for shorter slots
Francesco joins not a day too soon. Only until the 6th of August can proposals be made for what, why, and how Ethereum should change in the future Hegotá upgrade.
Users, developers, asset issuers, basically almost everyone, has told us and other Ethereum core devs repeatedly that they need shorter slots (see here for why). Blockspace supply is outpacing demand today already. With the next upgrade (Glamsterdam; the one before Hegotá), Ethereum's throughput increases by at least another 3x. Blockspace quantity is not the bottleneck, quality is.
Taking the feedback to heart, @barnabemonnot leads the lab's sprint to understand to what extent Ethereum's slot times can be decreased in the Hegotá fork. Early conversations with core devs and EF researchers identified various blockers, for example the propagation time of proofs Ethereum needs when it snarkifies the EVM (EVM -> zkEVM) could be substantial.
#How to grow Ethereum's userbase?
That is the question I have been trying to answer since starting Ethlabs. Users drive Ethereum's economy and are the ultimate beneficiaries of Ethereum's properties. The goal is to give users from all over the globe access to more assets and better markets, to improve user experience as money legos make development cheap, to prevent deplatforming through censorship resistance and escape hatches, etc.
In the past weeks I've spoken with 100+ builders, devs, growth leads, venture capitalists, and policy advocates from all continents ramping up on where the ecosystem is headed and primarily where and how new users can be served. I'm particularly interested in the growth of consumer apps like Robinhood and EtherFi.
We are now converting the wide exploration into a more polished growth strategy leveraging Ethlabs' unique non-profit and central position in the ecosystem to help companies on Ethereum attract more users and capital.
I can't reveal everything yet but I am very excited about someone new we hired to help accelerate Ethereum's growth 👀.
#Things happening
We are closing community round 2 and are very grateful to soon announce more anchor funders. We are exploring a builder-in-residence program. We are likely to be in: NYC around the end of August; in Hong Kong and Shanghai in September; in Singapore around Token2049.
See you next week!
Check out last week's update for more information on our technical strategy to make Ethereum faster and seamless.